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Members of the European Parliament raised the issue of whether Ukraine’s case should be reconsidered under CBAM rules, amid the country’s war with Russia, at a meeting of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), on May 5.
“I really struggle with how we treat Ukraine,” the Parliament’s rapporteur on CBAM, Mohammed Chahim, said during the meeting. “We have to reassess the force majeure that we have in place. I cannot imagine what country and situation we can think of under which force majeure would be activated.”
Oleksandr Vodoviz, the head of the chief executive officer’s team at Ukraine’s Metinvest Group, said that despite a “couple of months of frustration” following the implementation of the regime on January 1, there has been no change in behavior from European buyers purchasing Ukrainian steel.
“[European customers] are ready to buy at the same level as they did before. They need our products,” Vodoviz told Fastmarkets, adding that no contracts were cancelled as a result of the new regulatory framework.
But he noted that Metinvest’s business has been affected by the current geopolitical situation, including threats to its facilities and disruption to its operations linked to Russian shelling.
“Our electrical infrastructures are affected almost every day and we do not have the workforce to get on the job. These are issues that European steel manufacturers do not encounter at all,” he said.
Metinvest’s operational results for the first quarter of 2026 showed 12% and 20% quarter-on-quarter decreases respectively in the outputs of hot metal and crude steel, which the company attributed to “unstable” power supply.
Recently, other Ukrainian producers have also had to alter their outputs due to a combination of security, logistics, power supply and other economic constraints linked to the war.
On May 6, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih (AMKR) announced the shutdown of its mining and steel production facilities due to disruptions to Ukraine’s railways, which limited deliveries of raw materials to the plant.
At the time, chief executive officer Mauro Longobardo said that the company had operated at a loss for four years because of high energy costs, competition from importers and market changes linked to CBAM.
Currently, Ukraine is treated as a non-EU exporter under the CBAM framework, with no mitigating circumstances applied. Longobardo previously noted that the EU’s stance would mean an additional cost of $60-90 per tonne for Ukraine to access the bloc’s market.
“Our position is that we are ready to invest in decarbonization… but we cannot attract any money now to Ukraine, so we are asking the European Commission to give us more time to prepare,” Vodoviz added.
Ukraine remained a candidate for accession into the EU, with Brussels and Kyiv continuing discussions on the application of mitigating circumstances for the country under CBAM.
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